Ranked #1248

X-Day (Manga)

Story: 8/10
4 persons (3 students and a teacher) meet in the school chat room. They all blame the school as the source of their problems, so they decide to blow it up. As the characters get to know each other, they begin to realize that their problems are situated in other aspects of life as well, not just from the school. They start to help each other to deal with the problems.
'Loneliness' is a very important part of the story.

Art: 9/10
The art fits the serious theme; no chibis, no overdrawn gestures or expressions.
Sometimes you can feel the characters suffering because of looking at the pictures. Sometimes there may be a lack of backgrounds, but sometimes it just fits the scene. A small amount of panels also contain just 'screenshots' from the online conversation, but that's okay, because it may give you the feeling of a 'real online conversation' and how else would you be able to tell the reader what they're writing there?

Character: 10/10
All characters have their very own problems which makes them rather unique and special.
Jangalian, a grumpy biolgy teacher, is stalked by his boss's daughter and annoed by his students.
11 is overstrained by her life; she was dumped by her boyfriend, who took a younger girl, who starts beating 11 at everything she was good at.
Mr. Money is abused by his mother and she blames him for all her problems. Therefore, he's afraid of women.
Polaris is very shy and silent... as long she has to wear her school uniform. As soon as she dresses as a gothic lolita, she's a totally different person.

Enjoyment: 9/10
The manga is nothing for those, who search for some happy-go-lucky-mangas with cheerful characters and a world full of joy. it's the exact opposite. It shows four normal persons, who can't deal with their problems anymore. The main problem is something everybody knows:
Loneliness.
I enjoyed this manga very much, because it was deep and I guess everybody felt already like some of the characters already.

Overall: 9/10
It's an awesome manga with elements of psycho and a bit of romance. It shows how your problems can bring you down and your friends can build you up...
And that's blowing up the cause of your problem isn't always the only solution. read more

Rika, Saginuma (the protagonist) goes to highschool with a smile on her face, she gets good grades, she has a bunch of friends and the year before she got second place in the inter-highschool championships of track-and-field but she quit and she's single.

School life at its best, no?

Behind that plastic smile, Rika, Saginuma is morose. Her ex-boyfriend had moved on, dating the up and coming track-and-field star of the school; Rika watches from afar, as her boyfriend's relationship deepens with his new girlfriend and as the girlfriend, slowly gets better and better at track-and-field until; maybe... she'll be better than Rika...? But what is Rika worrying about, she quit track-and-field hadn't she...?

All these thoughts eat away at the protagonist, her smile never moving, her eyes though remain untouched by it, staring at her bleak surroundings; cold and hollow.

On a whim, Rika joins a chatroom and sees people complaining about the school, she typed a careless remark, a forbidden illogical desire: 'I wish this place called school would just disappear'.

Something everyone and I mean EVERYONE has thought of once in their lives. Not technically school: a person, a place, an object, yourself; everyone at one point in their lives has wanted something to disappear.
But most of the time, nothing really happens.

But someone actually took it literally:

'That sounds good. Should we get rid of it, then?'.

I liked the idea, I thought it was an interesting story though the outcome was far from the one I hoped (I can't even say expected) but it had an okay ending. The characters were, I must say, pretty random but realistic randomness, if you get what I mean. And if you don't I totally understand.

Anyway, what I got out of the story was: life stinks but try not to act like a maniac when you hit bottom.

The art was okay, it didn't have many details, forget that, it didn't have REAL detail. Sure you can tell the difference between doors and people but come one! If you couldn't, you'd have some retarded eyes or the illustrations were some really weird crap. I'm not talking about outlines, I'm talking about REAL DETAIL. Shading, shadows and the likes. Which this story definitely doesn't have. Proportion was average except for those eyes. Those really weird, creepy, I mean seriously, creepy eyes. If I woke up one morning to find my eyes looking like one of E.T.s friends; I'd have a heart attack then and there.

Realism was something the illustrator seemed to have forgotten about while drawing the art.

I do recommend this, it was a mellow read. It wasn't earth-shattering nor was it a kind of otherworldly revelation, it was a story with a nice idea. read more